What divorce and Keira told me about England

Friday 7 September 2007 14:02 BST

Cool customer: Keira Knightley stars as Cecilia Tallis in Atonement

Rarely have I seen a film that's so good it made me rethink my life. But watching Atonement, the film of Ian McEwan's novel, did exactly that. It is a great film about Englishness, that made me reflect on my relationships with the English - and made me wonder whether I can truly be one of them.

I've tended to regard English reserve and understatement as a cold and aloof pose of superiority that implied a lack of human concern. Watching James McAvoy play Atonement's hero, Robbie Turner, I saw how this reserve is cultural and, in fact, a language of its own, full of emotional intensity and texture, that when expressed is all the more telling for having leaked through the cracks of self-control.

Readers of the novel will already know the plot - but there is a real treat in store at the cinema if, like me, you come to it new. A victim of injustice, prised apart from the woman he loves, Robbie forced lumps into my throat as he stifled tears and measured his temper. His restraint displayed more rage, longing and despair than any character I can remember. He showed that the English are a people seething with passion but who express it in a way that others barely perceive.

Born in England, I am English. But I was raised by Indians in a neighbourhood where most of the people I knew were immigrants or their children. My education in English mores and mannerisms came mostly from TV and schoolteachers. Though I have native English friends and married an English woman, it is only now that I realise how I've misread them.

I was raised around tactile people whose emotional lives were writ large on their faces, who didn't consider, let alone censor their feelings before shooting their mouths off. In McEwan's novel, the only moment in which a character gives full vent to her emotions is when Robbie's working-class mother shrieks and thrashes the police car that is taking away her son for a crime he didn't commit: an exceptional expression of elemental feelings that cannot be withheld.

Re-reading that passage I smiled, remembering how it only took the discovery of a packet of cigarettes under my bed to send my mum into a similar fit. Anyone who thinks that Bollywood films are unfeasibly melodramatic doesn't know Indians - and certainly not Punjabis.

My grandparents' generation of Punjabi Sikhs were earthy, peasant stock, and my parents inherited their operatic emotionality. Feelings ran riot in my family: laughter and raging arguments rang through the house in vast and equal measures. I'd be screamed at for minor misbehaviour, but also cuddled, petted and physically cherished. To this day, I hug and kiss my parents and siblings on saying hello and goodbye. My personality contains many ancestral traits, though now expressed in a cockney accent: I am gobby, sentimental, habitually foul-mouthed, and effusive.

For those from more expressive cultures, the English can seem like they exist behind a pane of glass - impossible to grasp and connect with. My first real immersion in English life was at university, where I often felt alone and isolated. But much of it was due to my inability to appreciate the warmth that was extended to me, articulated in a muted form that was wholly foreign.

On first meeting, Indians will ask one another intimate questions about their family and marital status, their parents' occupations, and their own hopes and ambitions. The English, however, tiptoe into their relationships, and the seemingly anodyne conversations I heard the other students have - about the weather, their schools and pets - were in fact a subtle creation of rapport and a gauging of mutual compatibility that assessed social background and values. It was a code I couldn't read. I regarded it as empty, platitudinous chitchat, and subsequently overlooked many people's good-natured efforts to befriend me.

The only other Asian on my degree course had been to public school. In my company he would be openly warm and expressive, but in a group he'd become restrained and impersonal, while I remained as fulsome as ever.

I thought he did this because he was embarrassed by me and wanted to disassociate himself; but he was simply engaging with the English in their language and making them at ease. My own tempestuous nature and instinctive over-familiarity often unsettled them. They found it overbearing and intrusive, and I would regard their recoiling from my manner as a personal rejection.

My misunderstanding of Englishness even contributed to the failure of my marriage. I resented my wife for what I saw as detachment and indifference, when her concern was constantly expressed in words and gestures that were below my emotional radar.

For instance, when a close friend of mine died, I was bitter at the lack of emotion she displayed at the funeral. My friend had been black, as were most of the other mourners, and people I hardly knew took me in their arms and comforted me, while my wife stood aside seeming impassive. But she was the daughter of a former army captain, raised to display emotion with discrimination and formality. While I begrudged the absence of a hug from her, I had overlooked the enormous sentiment she had expressed by taking time and exercising her taste to select a beautiful wreath. It was a cultural symbol that had been lost on me.

My marriage failed - my decree nisi has just come through - and I'd thought I'd be making flippant jokes this week about how my divorce had marked another day of Indian independence. But having seen Atonement, I have instead contemplated the theme of Englishness and how I've often woefully misjudged it.

I also know it is a subject that I am only just beginning to grasp. Now in my thirties, having experienced some of life's major issues - love, death, divorce - I've finally acquired the sobriety and evenness to appreciate the understated nuances of the English culture that, until now, have been almost invisible to me.

The essence of the English exists in their silences, in how they load quiet actions with extraordinary content. McEwan captures this beautifully in a passage in which Robbie briefly meets Cecilia - the love of his life - after being separated for years. Unable to speak, he takes her hand just before parting. "The gesture had to carry all that had not been said," writes McEwan, "and she answered it with pressure from her own hand."

The English are hard on themselves for not making more of an effort to understand other cultures; but it should also be stated just how poorly others understand them.